Connection To Habitability
The concept of a habitable zone has been used by Planetary scientists and astrobiologists to define an orbital region around a star in which a planet (or moon) can sustain liquid water. Under this definition, the inner edge of the habitable zone (i.e., the closest point to a star that a planet can be until it can no longer sustain liquid water) is determined by the point in which the runaway greenhouse process occurs. For sun-like stars, this inner edge is estimated to reside at roughly 84% the distance from the Earth to the sun although feedbacks such as cloud-induced albedo increase could modify this estimate somewhat.
Read more about this topic: Runaway Greenhouse Effect
Famous quotes containing the word connection:
“We will have to give up the hope that, if we try hard, we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)